I Made a Chrome Extension for Medium Users
Hey there. Are you a Medium user who wants to know more about authors you follow? If so, then I made a perfect chrome extension for you!
It is called Medium Any Author Stats.
If you are interested in reading an in-depth step-by-step article on how I created this extension (so you can make a Chrome extension on your own and learn some interesting development stuff) then check it out:
Why did I create it?
At the time of writing, there is one valuable Chrome extension for Medium authors that I found. It is called Medium Enhanced Stats and it increases the amount of data that can be seen on the Stats page. It’s a very good solution for Medium authors to get to know their audience better (I use it also from time to time).
However, there are some things that I missed. As a user, I want to know more about the authors I follow. How popular are they? How many posts do they have? Are some posts significantly more popular than others? Do they have “fake” followers or a truly engaging audience? Are they “one-post” authors? How did they achieve success so I can inspire?
All of those questions were coming through my mind and I couldn’t find the answer on the standard Medium home page or some minor extensions.
So, I decided to create an application to get and present that data. Due to some technical aspects, it was easiest to create a Chrome extension.
One weekend later Chrome extension was ready to be used.
Technical aspects: Medium does not provide any useful REST API and due to CORS there is no easy way to send request to get the data for specific author.
What information can you find in the extension?
Let’s break down each of the 3 sections present in the extension:
1. Basic information
The total posts number was the thing that I wanted the most in this extension. I was just curious. It turned out that on top of that I could also extract how many of the posts are member-only (locked). Cool. What I was really surprised about is that Medium gives us the information about newsletter subscribers someone has. It’s right there in your browser when you visit the Medium page, but who knows about it?
You can also check whether the author is a member or not.
2. Aggregated statistics in the table
Time for some calculation.
Claps are pretty straightforward: it is a sum of all claps on all posts published by the author. Per post/follower is this sum divided by the number of posts/followers.
Responses are a sum of all responses under all posts published by the author. Per post/follower is this sum divided by the number of posts/followers.
Clappers are a sum of all people under all posts that clapped. Clappers aren’t counted individually. It means that if someone clapped under 5 posts, they will be counted 5 times. Per post/follower is this sum divided by the number of posts/followers.
3. Statistics plot
The table shows aggregated statistics whereas the plot presents statistics per individual post. I find it useful because with that tool you do not need to go through every post to see claps and responses — you get them all on one customizable and zoomable graph.
You can now see what posts are considered the most interesting by the audience of a given author. From the image, you can conclude that my sixth post got the most attention. For more details about it you can hover over the plot:
There is the title, exact numbers and publish date.
Interpretation
Attention! This is my personal interpretation of the data. It may be wrong, imprecise, and biased. If you have some ideas on how to interpret the data, please share!
How I analyze this data
Calps and responses give me a basic understanding of how popular the author is. Per posts gives overall information on how valuable are author’s posts in general. Per follower tells me how engaging the audience of that author is. However, I keep in mind that those data can be biased — one very popular post will increase the average for all posts a lot. That’s why the median may be better here (maybe I will add it soon).
Clappers are less useful, but I use them to see if an author is using any multi-accounts to bust their popularity. I see it as more valuable if 50 people clap once than one person claps 50 times.
Final notes
I hope you will enjoy using the Medium Any Author Stats chrome extension. I made it for users to know more about the authors they follow, for authors to see other successful authors' data and get some insights, and for data-freaks to just look through data that is so skimped on Medium and enjoy it.
Keep in mind that data is cool, but the most important thing is what the author creates. Don’t forget to check out their posts to see if their theme, style, and format speak to you. Do not judge anyone on the data!
I give you a tool, make good use of it 🔥
If you enjoy Medium Any Author Stats chrome extension and you want to support me and get full access to stories on Medium, consider buying a membership from my referral:
